78 II 'I" ; , .', r( all the fQmily' .. $ . <$ ;".. ... " . .:.. '> '" -00-<<< '<',ë" 0,:" "':-..........y y """ ):"Jÿ .' v- .. " "</{ .' t. :',." '">. :<, -.. ;,.. ' ':,< .,. S ' .. . q-::-r.;:..,i >;; "< 1!8 II ,gs' .; , . . . .nav- I, .^ / I f . . '.'>.. BETTER SIGHT.... t;TTER S.OUNO...BETTEIr .-tiV /./YC: 53 East 57 St., New York " , 7 ---- ...--- .. <<' ...-.-" .............. ,. -..... .\ > ,II? #:. ..:. 0. Hats couture perfumes '" jewelry handbags gloves neckties ::::::;. .:.:.:. :::::: >< '* / 1/, _. -/.:. '" ,.. ( "'^" , " : :::::: "Globe Trotter " Moccasins Wear them as travel slippers, wear them after skiing! In soft cream-colored leather-with Tar- tan wool carrying case-they make handsome gifts, too. Small, medium large (state shoe size). $6.50 plus 25if. postage - no C.O.D/s 'The ..Bennuda Shol 554 Madison Ave., at 55th Sf. New York, N. Y. " Þ: in 1934 revealed that its plight was just about the most desperate in the country. Eighty-five per cent of the Key Westers were either on relief or badly in need of it. Noone, it seemed to Stone's in- vestigators, was working except the saloon proprietors, and they managed to keep going only by extending credit to generous but unsound and, in the end, ruinous lengths. The local government had defaulted on all its financial ohliga- tions, including salaries, and its services had completely collapsed. When Stone made his first visit to Key West, early in 1934, he found the streets piled so high with trash and garbage that walk- ing or driving through them was ex- tremely hazardous, when it was not al- together impossible. The F.E.R.A. survey showed that Key West's industriec; were not merely ill of the unIversal malady; the few that were not already dead were dying on their feet. The cigar-makIng business, which had once employed more than ten thousand workers, had long since been wrecked by cigarette smoking, strIkes, and machinery. Synthetic sponges, a sponge blight, and the superior talent and equipment of the experienced Medi- terranean divers, mostly Greeks, who had recently settled in Tarpon Springs had killed the market for sponges from Key West, which once accounted for ninety per cent of the country's supply. Repeal had put an end to rumrunning, except for local, or deferred-payment, consumption. The fishing was still good, but so wac; the fishing in all the waters around Florida, and the only market for Key West fish was Key West. The FlorIda East Coast Railway had for some time been in the hands of receivers, and their apparent ambition, in the view of Elmer Davis, who for decades has been an affectionate observer of Key West affairs, was to do so thorough and conspicuous a job of mismanaging the Key West line that they would finally be excused from their labors-an ambI- tion that was ultimately realized, with the unexpected help of Nature, in 1935, when waters whipped up by the Labor Day hurricane washed out forty-one miles of roadhed. The line was never rebuilt. There were still, in 1934, two long ferry gaps in the Overseas High- way, and these put trucking out of the question as an alternatIve to the rail- road. Finally, the military installations that had given Key West the tItle of "the American Gibraltar" and that for nearly a century had given work to the islanders were all but evacuated. Fort Taylor, once a regImental post, was In the hands of a maintenance crew that spent more time with its lawn mowers than with its gun emplacements. The Coast Guard had moved its district headquarters to St. Petersburg. As for the Navy, whIch now has a uniformed personnel of ten thousand on the island, its base was manned, when the first F .E.R.A. team arrived, by eighteen en- lIsted men and a lieutenant, junior grade. The outlook was so desolate that a number of people felt that the only sensible course was to pick up the entIre populatIon and resettle it on the main- land, surrendering Key West to its vegetation There was no hope of resuscitating the old industries, and no point, in view of the transport difficul- ties, in attempting to introduce new ones. "This wasn't a place where pump-priming would work," one of Stone's F .E.R.A. colleagues explained a few days ago. "The damned pump was busted, and., besides, there wasn't any water in the well." Stone came to much the sam conclusion after studying the survey, but he was opposed to the resettlement project. He held that the Key \\T esters, with no experi- ence in either farm or factory work, wouldn't be able to find Jobs on the mainland and, with their island ways, would constitute a social irritant as well as a financial burden wherever they were moved. Stone felt there had to be a Key West solution to the Key West problem. As he looked the place over, he became increasingly impressed with its possibilities as a reç;ort town. Me!1tal- ly removing the litter from the streets and applying fresh coats of paint to the houses, he began to see the outlines of an American Nassau or Bermuda. Stone was not the first man to have this vision. Twenty years earlier, Henry M. Flagler, the Rockefeller partner who developed the East Coast of Flori- da and whose name is more honored by far than that of Robert E. Lee In places like Palm Beach and Miami, had ex- tended his Florida East Coast Ra;lway down the Keys partly to prove that nothing was impossible when will power and venture capital were in good supply (it took fifty million dollars In venture capital and cost seven hundred lives) and partly to develop Key West as a vacation place. Th railroad built and managed the Cas a Marina, a big, luxu- rious hotel on the A tlan tic side of the town. That was as far as the develop- ment got. The Casa Marina, which is one of the leç;s offensive specimens of the archItectural style known as Florida Mediterranean, was never much of a success. Most of the time It was unable to fill its rooms and it went through a